20 Years Of Shooting Panoramic Images

June 14, 2018

20 Years of Shooting Panoramic Images.

For the past 20 years, I have been creating panoramic images all over the world during my travels. The panoramic technique is what got me interested in photography when I was a little kid, in elementary school.

My passion for photography started at the young age of 7, however, I did not start taking panoramic images until I was 14. At the time, my parents had a panoramic camera (Kodak Advantix). This was just your basic point and shoot camera, that allowed the user to look through the viewfinder and hit the shutter button. The user could also switch from panoramic mode to normal mode as well. To the left, you can see an image of myself on about halfway up a salt pile on the island of Bonaire, an island municipality of the Netherlands, which is off Venezuela’s coast in the southern Caribbean.

When I was 17, I had an interest in photographing street art, so I would drive down to Miami for the day or weekend. Using my Mom’s Minolta SRT101 film camera, I would take photos of murals in the Liberty City, Overtown and surrounding areas of Miami such as Kendall. At this time, I was taking overlapping images of the street murals. This was a little more difficult using film because you couldn’t just check to make sure the images were overlapping to create a full panoramic image. You had to wait once the film was developed, days or even weeks after taking the photos to see if the panoramic would work.

South Miami street art mural panoramic. date 1998

South Miami street art mural panoramic. date 1998

South Miami street art mural panoramic. date 1998

South Miami street art mural panoramic. This was at the old abandoned insane asylum off Krome Ave in Kendall. date 1998/1999

South Miami street art mural panoramic. date 1999

South Miami street art mural panoramic. date 1999

In February of 2012, I started shooting full spherical 360-degree panoramic images for Google Maps Street View. At the time the program was called Google Business Photos, and it brought Google’s world famous Street View into local businesses in select cities across the US. Since then, the program has expanded and is now available in almost every country in the world. Just after becoming certified with Google Maps to produce 360-degree spherical content for them, I started to combine my love for night photography, rocket photography and spherical panoramic photography. At this time, I started to create long exposure 360-degree panoramic images of rocket launches from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. You can view these 360-degree panoramic long exposure images of the rocket launched in my other posts. One of the long exposure images I created of an Atlas V rocket launch from the Exploration Tower at Port Canaveral was even featured on the Google Maps Street View home page back in 2014 for several months, being viewed over 25 million times.

In 2016, I purchased a DJI Phantom 3 Professional drone, and started shooting aerial 360° images with it. Using the Phantom 3 Professional drone to capture spherical panoramic images is not as easy as some of the newest models, but it allows me to capture 120-megapixel images from a unique viewpoint.

Today, I am still just as passionate about panoramic photography as I was when I was a teenager. I am lucky enough to travel the world and take images of incredible places and meet amazing people on my journey.